Fuzzy Curmudgeon – Page 468 – Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Which is more or less David Klinghoffer’s theme over at NRO.
[My goodness. The following turned into quite a long and rambling rant. I guess I have what the touchy-feely libs call “issues.”]
I’ve said for years that Jews spend far too much time defending against the paper tigers of assimilation and evangelicals. Most of the problems Jews have faced historically stem directly from attempts to build walls between themselves and other peoples (eg, via kashrut, which is most divisive of Jews and non-Jews because of the implied insult to a non-Jew when a Jewish acquaintance will not break bread with him). I am firmly of the opinion that this made other people think that Jews considered themselves better than everyone else (which may well have been true), and that was at the root of most of the enmity. It is really not much of a slippery slope to go in a thousand or more years from this initial dislike to hatred, and thence eventually to genocide. Allowing yourselves to be shut up in ghettos and affecting to like the idea because it shuts out the rest of the world is not conducive to good feeling. And I don’t want to hear that they had no choice in the matter of being shut up in ghettos. If you tried to do that to us today, there are at least a few of us who would invite you to kindly get fucked, and would back it up with force of arms. (One of the benefits of living in a democratic country with a Second Amendment.)
Christians in this country are not the threat to the Jewish community that they are made out to be. Most real Christians in this country bear Jews no ill will, and in fact are very interested in the survival of the State of Israel (if only for what Jews might consider selfish reasons). The biggest problems Jews in America face today are intermarriage and the resultant conversion of the Jewish partner or the decision to bring up children of the union as Christians rather than Jews. But I will submit that intermarriage occurs not because Christians are more desirable as mates for young Jewish singles, but because the young Jewish singles do not have a strong enough sense of identity AS Jews to keep them from straying outside the fold (or to convince a potential non-Jewish partner to swing over to the Jewish side).
And I chalk this up to the really lousy job of Jewish religious education that has been done, particularly in Reform synagogues, for the past 20 years. There is far too much liberal cant with regard to social justice and not enough emphasis on the philosophy that backs up the strong Jewish sense of community and morality. Given the left-wing bent of most of the Reform rabbinate, some of whom rarely miss a chance to take a swing at political conservatives from the pulpit, this is not a particular surprise. (I got up and very pointedly walked out of Kol Nidre services at the local Reform synagogue last year when the rabbi had the gall to denigrate “conservatives like Rush Limbaugh” as being ready to go straight to war against a nebulous enemy before we really knew who was responsible for 9/11. Maybe you didn’t know, Rabbi, but we clear-eyed conservatives had no doubt. Anyway, thankfully that guy is gone now, but I haven’t been a Reform Jew for years anyway; the wife and I go to the Conservative shul down the street.)
In my honest opinion the Reform movement was subverted years ago when the first women were accepted for the rabbinical program. For whatever reason most of the women I have ever known who were either in the program or were graduates of it were some of the most left-wing radical feminists it has ever been my displeasure to encounter. (Interestingly this did not appear to be the case with the women who entered the cantorate, which was opened to them some years before.) And I speak as one who spent a number of years preparing to apply to the seminary but ended up discouraged by what I saw and heard when I spent college weekends there. It was when I realized that I would not be able to keep my mouth shut for five whole years and pretend to be a good little liberal that I decided to work on a doctorate in History instead.
I believe wholeheartedly that this was also about the time that the social-justice crowd got hold of the religious school curriculum and cut out things like plain old Bible study. Although I remember when I was a boy going to religious school, the curriculum was very heavily Zionist, with not much emphasis on Bible, so what I observed years later as a teacher was probably just the logical extension of 20 years of programmatic leftward drift.
My reaction to that is probably why I had very few Jewish friends in school. Two of the women I was most serious about between high school and the time I got married were Catholic, one was Baptist, and another was some sort of Evangelical who had attended Johnson Bible College before I met her. I wasn’t really interested in Jewish women until I met a sweet little Jewish divorcee with two adorable kids in 1984, who got most of my interest for the next fifteen years — with a few timeouts for the Christian girls — before I met the Jewish woman who is now my wife Sally.
Tellingly, both of my Jewish girlfriends were Conservative and not Reform. One of them even likes Rush Limbaugh (the divorcee)…So my mistake as I see it was that I went to the wrong shul growing up. If I’d gone to the Conservative shul I would have met Sally 20 years ago instead of in January 2000 🙂
But getting back to my main point: I think we Jews burn altogether too much powder over imagined Christian encroachment on our children. If we looked to our own knittin’, it would be fairly obvious why our children intermarry and convert: because we don’t give them a strong sense of Jewish identity in the first place and then send them out into the world unprepared for the fact that they’re going to meet non-Jews to whom they may well become attracted.
You may note that I haven’t said much about Israel (and don’t blog about it much, either), and been somewhat dismissive of Zionism. That would be because as much as I support the right of the State of Israel to exist, you wouldn’t catch me there expending so much as a single cartridge to defend it. I’m an American, a proud citizen of the best country on the face of the earth. Israel, for all its sentimental attraction to some people, is a ghetto, and I already said I wouldn’t live in a ghetto. Most especially not a ghetto surrounded by 200 million kill-crazy Arabs.
(I’ll bet that gets a comment or two.)